Some people have objections to social media consultants who practice arbitrage, but this method can actually deliver the best results for the end client. Here are some ways arbitrage helps your customers:

While it is always a good idea to build your own social networks as large as you can, you can’t spend all of your time networking and besides it can take several years to build a truly huge network. However, there are plenty of people out there who have been building their Facebook and Twitter accounts for years, and they are often the people you see on sites like Fiverr offering the use of their own communities. By tapping into their networks, they can quickly get you the followers and likes you need. For example, if someone has 60,000 Twitter followers and names your client on #FollowFriday, it’s not a great stretch of the imagination to think that a few hundred or a few thousand will do as requested!

While you can probably get the likes and followers needed over time with lots of hard work and campaigning, that doesn’t help when you have a client who wants 400 likes “yesterday”. Again, access to the larger networks means likes can be bled in over the course of a few days, bumping your clients’ visibility and making them happy. Happy clients mean a happy YOU.

Another possible benefit is being able to customize networks by posting specific needs on the sites mentioned in this guide. For example, if you have a client in the furniture and interior décor industry and want to boost their Facebook Page with relevant followers, you could post asking for “50 Facebook followers needed in the interior design niche”. This is a reasonable number of Likes and there are plenty of people out there who have built up niche specific networks.

If you promise a client at least 400 Likes and they end up with 600, who do you think they will recommend to their friends and colleagues? Who do you think they will contact next time they need a boost? That’s right - under promising and over delivering can be word of mouth gold.

As long as you aren’t deliberately deceiving your clients by promising them specifically that you will manually be doing all of the work on their account, you shouldn’t feel bad about engaging in social media arbitrage. You are simply making use of the best tools at your disposal to ensure the best possible results for your clients.